I recently read that Google has been refining its page ranking algorithm (and probably using DeMorgan's Theorem) in an attempt to downgrade sites that are just lists of links. Over the past few weeks, I've noticed that our humble efforts here have elevated the site to #3 on a search of "Hitchens" over such syphocantic sites as Hitchens Zone and Build Up That Wall. And although Hitchens Web is still #1 ahead of Wikipedia, it's been moribund since May 10th. I think it's obvious that this is the "go to" site for the latest from our drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay!
The Great Fire of London. If you'd had your year of miracles interrupted by such a conflagation, wouldn't you be concerned about the dog knocking over a candle too?
Continuing our look at Hitch’s recent Vanity Fair hit-piece on one of the greatest scientists in history, his next demeaning observation about Isaac Newton is that, “like Russell, he was morbidly afraid of fire among his papers and books—fire which did, in fact, more than once break out.”
I hope I’m not being pedantic in pointing this out, but at a time when people lived and worked in timber-framed buildings, when manuscripts and other records were hand-written on highly flammable paper and prohibitively expensive to copy, and when lighting was provided by candles and heating and cooking employed open fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, fire was an omnipresent danger of a kind that most modern Westerners might have difficulty imagining.
During his lifetime, Newton experienced several fires in his own rooms, any one of which could have destroyed the records of years of hard work, and 1666 was also the year in which virtually the entire City of London was raised to the ground, reportedly as the result of a fire in a bakery.
Given these circumstances, Newton’s fear of loosing his papers and books to the flames can by no stretch of the imagination be described as “morbid”. Moreover, and this point cannot be overstated. Newton’s papers, like Russell’s, were extremely valuable as well as being irreplaceable, not merely to their authors, but to posterity and to Western Civilization as a whole. By contrast, I suspect that Hitch’s papers, if consumed by fire, would not be much missed by future generations of scholars or even by the contrarian himself, who at least would be spared the embarrassment of having others rummaging through them in search of dirt.
Moving on, we come to Hitch’s longest and most contentious paragraph, in which he metaphorically takes the knife he has been pricking Isaac’s reputation with, holds it up to the man’s portrait, and makes a series of slashes across the face. For purposes of commentary, let’s break this canvass ripping up into several sections.
In contrast with this clarity and purity, however, Newton spent much of his time dwelling in a self-generated fog of superstition and crankery. He believed in the lost art of alchemy, whereby base metals can be transmuted into gold, and the surviving locks of his hair show heavy traces of lead and mercury in his system, suggesting that he experimented upon himself in this fashion, too. (That would also help explain the fires in his room, since alchemists had to keep a furnace going at all times for their mad schemes.)
The Alchemist by Sir William Fettes Douglas. In the days before rock 'n' roll or power tools, alchemy provided a perfectly respectable outlet for solitary studious types. And anyone who says different will be turned into a toad—just like Hitchy.
While it may be acceptable to call a modern-day practitioner of alchemy a crank—and the description could also be fairly applied to anyone who still writes with a quill or wears a perfumed wig—the crank label cannot reasonably be pinned on their seventeenth-century counterparts. For a start, alchemy gave birth to chemistry and in Newton’s day, the latter was still nursing at the former’s breast. Newton practiced both, and in this he was by no means unusual. Many of the great scientific thinkers of his day were enthusiastic alchemists, including his friends Robert Boyle and John Locke, and his great rival Leibniz.
And far from being hare-brained, the schemes of alchemists provided the foundation on which modern chemistry was built. Some of its aims and quests may have turned out to have been dead ends—as is true of many human pursuits including those of science—while others are inexplicable to the modern mind, but tricks such as turning cinnabar into mercury and back were examples of what came to be seen as one of science’s most important tools—reproducible experiments. Without getting bogged down in arcane details, alchemy encompasses far more than the quest to turn lead into gold, a vulgar pursuit in which Newton had little interest. As with his two other lifelong passions of natural philosophy and theology, alchemy for Newton was all about seeking and discovering the truth about the world, which is as rare a commodity today as it was then.
Not content with the narrow views of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, he thought that there was a kind of universal semen in the cosmos, and that the glowing tails of the comets he tracked through the sky contained replenishing matter vital for life on Earth.
You can almost hear Hitch chuckling with self-satisfied mirth that he knows far more than Newton did about life in the cosmos. After all, he’s seen Carl Sagan’s Cosmos all the way through twice. But unfortunately as well as ironically for Hitchens’s smug narrative, Newton may well have been right about universal semen. The theory is known as Panspermia and it goes all the back to those ancient Greeks whose famed rationality Hitch so loves to fawn over, but in its modern form it is most closely associated with two more great Cambridge denizens, the late Sir Fred Hoyle and the still chirpy Chandra Wickramasinghe, neither of whom was or is particularly cranky.
He was a religious crackpot who, according to Ackroyd, considered Catholics to be “offspring of the Whore of Rome.” He was also consumed by arcane readings of the book of Revelation and obsessed with the actual measurements of the Temple of Solomon. Newton elected to write his already difficult Principia Mathematica in Latin, boasting that this would make it even less accessible to the vulgar.
“Religious crackpot” is virtually a tautology according to Hitchens’s philosophy, under which no believer can possibly be totally crack-free, but the idea that Catholics are the offspring of the Whore of Rome sounds a lot like something Hitch himself might have come up with had he been Newton’s contemporary. The phrase has a mild if dismissive and insulting partisan ring to it, but for the English of the time, Catholics were as much an enemy waiting to swarm across the Channel and burn the Anglicans for heresy because they hated their freedoms as today’s Muslims are for Hitch, Martin Amis and the BNP today. Indeed, they were more so, because they were a real rather than a phantom enemy. Indeed, one can easily imagine a Restoration or Regency version of Hitch taunting visiting Catholic scholars by asking them what they did with their women.
Likewise, measurements of the Temple of Solomon, and indeed the Great Pyramids of Giza, were all the rage in seventeenth century England. Everyone who was anyone was at it. Both the Tudor and Stuart Royal Families had traced their Celtic ancestry back to King David and the British traditionally considered themselves to have been descended from the lost tribes of Israel (as well as from the defeated survivors of Troy), while the Stone of Scone, on which British monarchs are crowned, is said according to one tradition to have originally been Jacob’s pillow stone before residing in Solomon’s Temple. London after the Great Fire was rebuilt as “The New Jerusalem”—a Christianized version of the Holy City—for this reason. The embracing of such iffy legends may well have been sinister piffle, but it was politically correct, reasonably harmless fun, and it helped to pass the long winter nights—not only for Newton but for countless other British intellectuals at the time.
Writing a book on science or mathematics in Latin and attempting to make them inaccessible to the vulgar were sound practices given that Latin was the lingua franca of scholars throughout Europe and that monolingual non-academic smart Alecs would not have understood the work in their own language but might well have made a pig’s breakfast of misunderstanding it—just as Hitch manages to misconstrue so much about almost every scientific subject he touches on thanks to the efforts of Hawking, Sagan, Dawkins and others to make the hard sciences accessible to the layman.
One thing you have to understand about Isaac Newton is that he didn’t tolerate fools gladly. He didn’t want to deal with the endless questions that were bound be raised about his ideas by simpletons and pseudo-intellectuals alike.
Even among friends, he could be extremely terse when annoyed, as evidenced by the rebuke he is reported to have repeatedly given his friend Edmond Halley whenever the latter said something disrespectful of religion.
Isaac Newton at forty-six, as painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller in 1689.
Sir Isaac Newton is a personal hero of mine. I admire him as a great scientist and an indefatigable seeker after truth, who despite being a tortured soul and suffering a traumatic rustic childhood—complete with wicked stepfather and bratty stepsiblings—managed to carve out a stellar academic career for himself without the slightest encouragement of his family. He was also, by all accounts, a pain in the arse to be around. But nobody’s perfect, and whatever his blemishes, Isaac certainly does not deserve to be posthumously dug up to provide fodder for one of Christopher Hitchens’s singular close encounters of the turd kind. Lamentably, this is precisely what has happened in the online edition of Vanity Fair.
That Newton was a Cambridge man is apparently all the justification our Contrarian needs to get nibbling like a gutter press rat on the man’s reputation. Hitch admits to having been hopelessly deficient in science and mathematics as a Cambridge schoolboy himself, and confesses to harboring “the false hope” that he might acquire some slight knowledge of these subjects by drinking as much of the local water as he could, although his efforts were ultimately of little avail beyond bladder training. This credulous superstition, or scientific hypothesis, depending on the observer’s standpoint, opens his April 2008 article entitled Flaws of Gravity. While Hitch has made an effort to study Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of England’s finest scientific mind, he is handicapped by his lack of any grounding in or feel for science. But far more than this, he is prevented from doing the book or its subject justice by his insatiable habit of sniffing out any hint of a scandalous, lewd, shocking, or otherwise juicy detail with which to titillate his readership.
Although this article is billed as a review of a biography of Newton, Hitchens, perhaps in unstated recognition that he is not really up to that task, spends fully the first third of it establishing mood by describing his own childhood in Cambridge, providing a potted guided tour of the city’s venerable institutions, and giving a nod to some of the better-known bright minds to have lived and worked within the bosom of the University, including Darwin, Russell, Crick, Watson and Hawking.
As a result, by the time he’s ready to introduce us to the Great Elucidator, the Contrarian has already taken up residence in his own narrative to the extent that Newton, or to be more precise, the man's good name, is forced into the by now familiar role of dead horse for Hitchens’s trademark brand of flogging. After a few obligatory words about how Newton was “the greatest figure of them all”, and a short anecdote about how the young Isaac experimented with his own sight that is definitely not for the squeamish, Hitch gets to work on what he does best—a form of torture well known to the ancient Chinese as the character assassination of a thousand cuts.
In his opening salvo, Hitch tries to collapse the concept of scientific genius down to little more than thoroughness and hard work, resisting the temptation to quote Edison in favor of a less famous quip by another Cambridge scholar who is best known as the father of Virginia Woolf:
We tend to love anecdotes about apples and eurekas because they make scientific genius seem more human and more random, but that other great Cambridge denizen Sir Leslie Stephen was closer to the mark when he claimed genius was “the capacity for taking trouble.” Isaac Newton was one of the great workaholics of all time, as well as one of the great insomniacs. His industry and application made Bertrand Russell look like a slacker.
If only “genius” could be so simply arrived at, we would scarcely have need of the word. “Diligence”, “perseverance”, or even “assiduity” could do as good a job. But while hard work and attention to detail are among the prerequisites, other ingredients are also required, including inspiration, a knack for simplifying, clarifying, imagining and asking the right questions, and a talent for making what others find impossible look easy.
In the “Annus Mirabilis” of 1666—actually an almost two-year period beginning in the autumn of 1665—the newly graduated Newton studied at home and made fundamental breakthroughs in four separate areas of mathematics and physics, accomplishing more during this brief interval than most workaholic scientists manage in a lifetime. And he didn’t do this for the sake of working hard or taking trouble. His work was not labour but play, and he did it out of a passion for knowledge and for the exhilaration of discovering and exploring the unknown.
This much can be inferred from his own writing, including his well-known summation of what his endeavors were all about:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
There's nothing particularly sexy about Chris Hedges, except that he's one of the best journalists in the country. What can I say? I agree with almost everything he writes. Commenting on Tim Russert, he recently wrote, "no real journalist makes $5 million a year" within the context of a piece talking about how American journalism has been hijacked by "courtiers" who care only about their careers and not real news. High Five!
Hedges' latest bookCollateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians co-written by Laila Al-Arian is largely a collection of interviews with 50 American combat veterans of the Iraq war. Hedges and Al-Arian talk about how soldiers have to become war criminals simply to stay alive. That the war over there is an "atrocity-producing situation". They break it down into various categories of death. There are the mobile checkpoints where civilians are routinely shot. There are the American convoys that barrel through the streets at high speeds destroying everything in their paths. And so on and so forth.
I mention all this in part because Hedges is I believe a perfect counter or antidote to Hitchens. I know the Decents think Hitch leveled Hedge last year in their debate, but you really have to read Hedges' books to get the idea. Hitch, as usual, out-performed his opponent, but he didn't win on points. Hitch is a great demagogue, which is why all you suckers love him.
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Christopher Hitchens: Why Women Still Aren't Funny
For Hitch, men need to be funny to get laid and women don't; after all, they have vaginas. For this reason, the male effort to be funny is "much more highly evolved" and "much more evolutionarily self-selective" than the corresponding female effort. Indeed, women's sense of humor, in Hitch's somewhat jaundiced view, esentially evolved for no other purpose than to allow them to appreciate how funny men are and to respond accordingly with open arms and legs, or, presumably, for the more flaccid and puffed out but nonetheless funny middle-aged men among us, blow jobs.
One problem with this hypothesis is that it doesn't provide any clues as to why the Germans of both sexes are universally acknowledged to be so incredibly funny without them being funny at all. Also, our contrarian makes no attempt to distinguish between being actively or passively funny, intentionally or unintentionally funny, amusingly, perculiarly or ridiculously funny, etc.
But clearly, all those hotel breakfast chats with Richard Dawkins have been having a considerable effect on Hitch, allowing him to discern selfish genes lurking behind all sorts of facets of human behavior. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before he begins boring fellow guests at cocktail parties with tiresome anecdotes about memes too.
All in all, this is a very funny video featuring a really funny man at an incredibly funny time of life.
Hitchens was on a CSPAN panel recently to regale us mortals yet again with some of his sophisticated analysis of all subjects under the sun. In this episode our polymath pretends to be an expert on pop culture and political satire in the new media:
My favourite part is around 28:20 when he is asked a question about Hillary Clinton:
It's not the only thing the Clinton campaign screwed up. I think the main thing they screwed up, and i really really rejoice in saying this, is that the person they thought was their secret weapon, the great campaigner, the great political genius, the great ex-president, revealed to a crucial number of people, something that most of us already knew, that he's a raging psycho. And it's been very gratifying thinking that people who could of caught up to that 10 or so years ago, are catching up to that now. When they think of... if there was only one reason why they've lost it will have to be because of him, and that pleases me more than I can say. I feel as if I'm going to have an orgasm in my trousers. I do, I've waited a long time for this.
Putting aside Hitchens' potty-mouth, he's really gone off the rails with his analysis of William Jefferson here. Now Hitch prides himself on being a tough critic of Clinton, despite being an apologist for some of Bubba's worst crimes (i.e. bombing the Balkans, although he does lambast Clinton for not killing enough Serbians). And Chris is also, as the above video further demonstrates, still sexually obsessed with Slick Willie. Let's not forget he was a full-throated advocate of all the silliness over Monicagate, and beyond, which probably on the whole was politically helpful for Clinton--helping transform him into a kind of Jack Kennedy like figure for many Americans, and distracting the public from his real crimes. When the Republicans went overboard on the issue it ended up completely backfiring on them, with Clinton's approval rating actually increasing during the inquisition, and the Republican majority losing seats in the '98 midterm, forcing Gingrich to resign.
But the question before the house is the following: if there was only one reason behind Hillary's loss, was it Bill Clinton?
Answer: No, give me a break.
There were many reasons why she lost, most notably being that it was more about Obama winning than her losing, but there are a multitude of reasons that come to mind: ignoring the caucuses and smaller states; not being prepared for a primary race beyond Super Tuesday I; relying heavily on out-of-touch, overpriced and idiotic political consultants like Mark Penn; underestimating Obama's political acumen; having hawkish policies that turned off the Democratic base; voter backlash against her "inevitable" and quasi-monarchical coronation in the media; neglecting online fundraising until it was too little too late; being a transparently plastic candidate; etc.. etc.. etc.. So basically, there's no easy answer, and it is a crass oversimplification to lay all of the blame at Bubba's door. Bill didn't perform as well as expected, but it's clear that he was crucial for Hillary in securing some of those small-town, working-class, Red State votes, with his rigorous stumping and obvious political abilities. And the absurd scandal over his "racist" comments before the South Carolina primary were more a case of the Obama campaign spinning his comments to play to African-American voters than anything Clinton said. To say that Bill wasn't helpful for Hillary's campaign (when there wouldn't have been a Hillary campaign in the first place without him), and to even go as far as saying he was the main reason for their loss, is simply ideological blindness.
Sure it's nice to see a mass-murdering Machiavellian like Slick Willie blocked from getting his third term and all, but come on, show some intellectual honesty Hitch.
It is the silence of Mandela, much more than anything else, that bruises the soul. It appears to make a mockery of all the brave talk about international standards for human rights, about the need for internationalist solidarity and the brotherhood of man, and all that. There is perhaps only one person in the world who symbolizes that spirit, and he has chosen to betray it. Or is it possible, before the grisly travesty of the runoff of June 27, that the old lion will summon one last powerful growl?
Well, now Nelson has let out a growl just ahead of the deadline. So perhaps Hitch will leave the old lion in peace and get on with some growling of his own. There is a tragic failure of leadership in the USA too, which has created a situation at home and abroad that makes a mockery of all the brave talk about international standards for human rights, about the need for internationalist solidarity and the brotherhood of man, and much else besides. The continued betrayal of that spirit by Hitch has made him a sort of symbol too, although less of a lion than a lying ...
Buchanan has a new piece currently on antiwar.com, again attacking our boy. He makes a good, simple point: why were German crimes punished after the war while British and American crimes were not? "Victor's justice." He quotes Hitchens agreeing with the notion that the carpet-bombing of German cities was justified in light of the Holocaust. I'll quote the final and strongest graphs of Buchanan's article:
The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented "crimes against humanity." This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.
We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.
It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war's end, "We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as "victor's justice." Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft "A Profile in Courage" for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.
I was perusing through my favourite hysterically conservative website Frontpagemag.com the other day, and I couldn't help but be struck by a blog post from the lovable David Horowitz, a man whom describes Hitchens as a "dear friend":
Leave it to Christopher Hitchens to skewer the hypocrisy of the "liberal" press. In a Slate review of Doug Feith's indispensable book on the calculations that went into the war in Iraq, War and Decision, Hitchens contrasts the massive media attention to a water-fly named Scott McLellan [sic] who didn't know what he was doing when he was the president's press secretary and certainly doesn't know what he's doing now, the Washington Post, the NY Times, the LA Times and other guardians of the Fourth Estate have blacked out Feith's book, which was published two months ago. As it happens they have done the same to the book Ben Johnson and I have written, Party of Defeat, which is not an insider account like Feith's but does document the five year sabotage of the war policy by Democrats and radicals. Kudos to Slate for publishing Christopher's review.
The arch-reactionary Horowitz gives Hitchens another high-five!
Although one has to give credit where credit is due. Hats off to Horowitz for pointing out the hypocrisy of "liberal" press. Despite claiming to be critical of the war, they refused to pay much attention to the revealing parts of Feith's book, especially where he discusses the calculations that went into the war. In the book Feith outlines Rumsfeld's Oct. 2002 memo--dubbed the "Parade of Horrors"--which pretty much predicts everything that would happen, further demonstrating how the Bush Administration deliberately misled the public into thinking that the war would be a cakewalk, when they were fully aware of what they could be getting America into. The "liberal" press should have had a field day with this, but instead practically buried the story. For shame.
I also think this brief reminder of Hitchens' friendship with Horowitz opens the door wide open for yet another discussion on why Hitchens should be hung, drawn and quartered (followed by a little tar-and-feathering if there's time). He continues to go out of his way to canoodle with a real rogue's gallery of some of the most reactionary and disgusting commissars, crooks and cretins out there. It's a strange thing for him to keep doing considering he's the last true proponent of the values of the Left and all.
Horowitz characterized his relationship with his holla back girl Hitchens as a "beautiful friendship" in that barn burner held by the "Freedom Center" last June, and Chris is also a regular accomplice to Horowitz's silly jihad against the Left--i.e. the latest "Islamofascism Awareness Week" (I can't wait for the next one!) where Hitchens attempted to square the circle for the Right yet again by making facile moral equivalences between Fascism and Jihadism. What better way is there for Hitch to defend the true values and principles of the Left apart from teaming up with a modern day Pobedonostsev? I, for one, can't think of any.
Now some of you Hitch-haters out there might be saying "If Hitchens was the last true proponent of the values of the Left and all, why would he choose to be friendly, and often even personal friends, with some of the most extreme and clearly insane reactionaries in America: David Horowitz, Hugh Hewitt, Dinesh D'Souza, Tom Delay, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist, etc.. etc.. ad infinitum?"
Well Hitch-hater, you are clearly suffering from precisely the objectively pro-Islamofascocommieconfederate disorder that forced Hitchens to cut and run from the Left in the first place. Just because Chris hangs around with a bunch of ultraconservative crackpots at Frontpagemag.com, and joins in their frothfests and paroxysms crying out for the blood of enemies, traitors and thought-criminals--the loony Left for some strange reason has to go on frowning upon all of it. I mean what is this world coming to?
Or how could Chris not pen such a smarmy little obituary for William F. Buckley in that non-Rightist rag The Weekly Standard? So what if Chris still holds to his views concerning the Cold War--meaning that he should believe Buckley was a leading advocate of global mass-murder and complicit in the deaths of millions of Indochinese? And of course there's no point in making a big deal out of any ancient history, like Buckley's proclivity for homophobic tirades on national television, or once even calling for homosexuals with AIDS to be tattooed.
Well, Hitch does mention some of these points--but all is forgiven because Buckley had him on Firing Line a few times and was real nice to him! How pathetic. I guess you can't let a few million dead here and there get in the way of rubbing shoulders with an influential conservative figure eh?
Why doesn't Chris just come out of the closet already and admit he is now a card-carrying Right-Winger? We're all waiting for it.
But alas, it appears that we'll have to keep on waiting (and not that sinister wine-pushing variety of waiting), as our Ronin still doesn't seem to quite realize that he is no longer masterless--despite it becoming obvious to all and sundry that his new masters are clearly the reactionary Right and the Parties of God. What a disgusting sack of something or other Hitchens is for it.
Most of us have heard of Blackwater, the oh so lucky company that's picked up billions of dollars providing services in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of us have also heard of the travails of their US staff, locked up and denied the courts when raped by other staff. We have also heard of their Iraqi victims, denied any recompense or support at all.
"One of their subsidiaries, Presidential Airways, is being sued by the widows of three soldiers who died in a plane crash that the National Transportation Safety Board says was the fault of their employees. Presidential Airways operates on a Pentagon contract in Afghanistan, transporting soldiers back and forth around the country among many other duties. In 2004, one of their flights crashed in the mountains, killing the three man crew and three soldiers on board. The widows of the three soldiers are suing Presidential for negligence and they've got a case. But now the company has made a motion to dismiss the case, and the grounds for that dismissal simply have to be seen to be believed."
"First, they argue that because the crash took place in Afghanistan the court should apply Afghani law - Sharia law - in the case. And guess what that law says? It says that companies shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of their employees. In other words, even though we hired the crew, trained the crew and had them flying under policies we mandated, we have no fault whatsoever. "
But ..."Blackwater has argued vociferously that their employees absolutely should not be covered under the law of the nations they are operating in pursuant to our government contracts. In the case where one of their employees shot and killed the bodyguard of the Iraqi vice president, did Blackwater let that employee be prosecuted under Iraqi law? Nope. They spirited him out of the country within 24 hours."
"However, they're also claiming exemption from American law. And that brings us to the second argument for dismissal and the second instance of stunning chutzpah, detailed by the Charlotte News Observer: Presidential Airways argued that the lawsuit must be dismissed; legal doctrine holds that soldiers cannot sue the government, and the company was acting as an agent of the government. Again, bear in mind that Blackwater's position all along has been that its employees are not government agents."
These are the bastards (with contacts in the republican party) that are theoretically helping remould these two benighted countries towards democracy and freedom TM.
As one commentator said, and FGFM could explain to the economically illiterate like me..
"The whole thing basically amounts to an extension of arbitrage from the market to the courthouse. Constantly move from one jurisdiction to another, depending on which one offers the best bargain for the given case. Utterly unacceptable; your pick of the worlds laws is no law at all."
So could one of the pro-intervention commentators please explain to me how the totally unaccountable actions of Blackwater are an extension of democracy?
London is a centre of extremist radicals and terrorists. Men and women who are wanted by foreign governments are allowed to walk around freely, proclaiming their vile and dangerous philosophies at places such as Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park and they meet in basements of front organizations to plot their latest outrage to society. The spineless British government fails to enact necessarily tough laws for incarcerating known menaces and it is only a matter of time before another bomb rips open the heart of Enlightenment values in a symbolic attack on reason.
This is the setting of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, in which much of Europe feels threatened by dangerous anarchists whose tactics include bombings and political assassinations as a way of sparking a revolution, a tactic sometimes referred to as "propaganda of the deed".
The secret agent of the title is a Marxist revolutionary, Adolf Verloc, who is employed by a foreign embassy to infiltrate anarchist groups and report back. He has led a comfortable life, running a shop specializing in pornography and radical literature, and he has made numerous contacts in the underground. But one day he is summoned early in the morning by the new ambassador who tells him that he hasn't been earning his money and that if he wants to continue in their service then he is to commit an act of terror to provoke public opinion into demanding "universal repressive legislation". The act is something that is referred to in the book as "authorized scoundrelism," but which these days would be called a "false-flag operation".
The ambassador, Mr. Vladimir, explains to Verloc, "The fetish of the day is neither royalty nor religion. Therefore the palace and the church should be left alone…The sacrosanct fetish of to-day is science… I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat could have a personal grievance against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there - eh?"
Verloc's mission is to destroy the Greenwich Observatory with a timebomb as it must appear as senseless a target as possible and rouse the public into demanding tough action against the anarchists. Verloc himself is unimpressed with Mr. Vladimir's analysis, as he describes the pompous ambassador informing him about his acquaintances:
Mr Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent world of Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organization where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of brigands that had ever camped in a mountain gorge.
If this book had been written last year instead of one hundred years ago, Christopher Hitchens may well have hurled it against the nearest wall as he did with John Updike's Terrorist, as there are a number of parallels between the two works which would seem far too allegorical to be coincidental. Which country is the shadowy embassy with its cynical "authorized scoundrelism" representating? Why are the anarchists, with one notable exception, all dismissed as a group of losers, ex-cons and ex-doctors instead of the genuine threat that today's terrorists undoubtedly are? What is all of this about selling fear to the masses based on irrational attacks on science? Why does the head of the police deliberately muddy the investigation because of personal ties he has to the terrorists' associates?
Conrad dedicates his book, "a simple tale of the XIX century" to the person he calls the "historian of the ages to come", H.G Wells, but his book appears far more prescient than Wells's confident assertions of human progress from the dark presaging of the use of mentally retarded relatives in suicide-bombings, to official cover-ups, zealous security officials wanting to suspend habeas corpus, and media manipulation of public opinion by foreign powers. It is in the light of this that John Gray has referred to Joseph Conrad as "the first novelist of the twenty-first century".
There are a number of people who comment on HW to the point that it was perfectly reasonable to believe that Saddam had WMDs due to the quality of information the US was receiving and that no matter what we had to get rid of Saddam.
For those people (you know who you are) I post this little gem.
"That's Why They Call It "Home Of The Whopper" The LA Times caught up with "Curveball", the guy who told the CIA all the bullshit about WMD in Iraq. I'd always thought he was a top scientist or something. Turns out that he left Iraq after his shampoo business failed (he was cheating his partners), his cosmetics business failed (he was cheating his suppliers) and he lost his job at a TV company (he was selling their equipment on the black market). He was working at a Burger King in Germany when we were deciding whether to invade Iraq: In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime. They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy. "During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said." His fellow Burger King employees knew he lying. (I imagine that the guy who gave him the codename 'Curveball' had an inkling too. I'm waiting for it to be revealed that the CIA's other informants were codenamed 'Play-action' and 'Headfake'). But he said what Bush wanted to hear, and the CIA bought it. If only a Burger King employee had been president instead of George W. Bush. "
From the LA Times "Alwan's life as a secret informant began in January 2000, soon after he applied for political asylum at Zirndorf, a refugee camp outside Nuremberg. He told a BND team he had helped run a secret Iraqi program to produce biological weapons, records show.
In 52 meetings with BND handlers over the next year and a half, he provided hand-drawn sketches and other details. German officials said they met mostly on Saturday mornings at a BND safe house. He liked to go for pizza afterward.Alwan didn't share all his secrets. He didn't disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.
He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind."
It's long account of a definite fabulist and it raises questions to me that not only would anyone believe this proven liar, but that all these years later otherwise educated people still think the US did the right thing.
As a young man in back 1968, Hitch wouldn't have been seen dead in a posh restaurant with tablecloths or waiters. It would have been a symbolic going over to the other side, not to mention leaving him with the additional conundrum of having to work out how small a tip he could get away with. Remember, back then he was singing the Internationale and talking about overthrowing capitalism around a campfire in Cuba. And for at least a decade after that he lived the life of a young Trotskyite, based mostly in London, where as I remember it, the workers used to get their grub from cafes or fish 'n' chip shops renowned for their Formica-topped tables and run by Italian or Greek immigrants, or the occasional pie & mash shop where the tabletops were slabs of marble. Meanwhile, in public and private sector firms alike, the dining facilities were divided into a large no-frills canteen section for the workers and a smaller, more comfortable restaurant section for managers that served the same food at higher prices and was kitted out with tablecloths, menus, vases of flowers, and a waitress service. But for a Trotskyite to walk past the rank and file in order to dine there was considered an act of class treachery back then.
That's the way things were in pre-Thatcher England, where class distinctions were a major item on most people's minds and the act of revealing one's class in front of others of a different class, or much, much worse, of acting like a member of a different class in front of one's peers, was apt to provoke a slew of negative emotions from unease and disgust to blind rage.
The young lower-class Hitch was by no means immune to these social realities. The details are obscured in the mists of time, but at some point he must have been invited into a posh Soho restaurant complete with candlelit tables and a wine list—possibly by spanker Johnson—and found he liked the atmosphere. This was, naturally, one small step in a long walk along the dark path that eventually led him to where he is today.
It wasn't that bourgeois dining caused Hitch to swing to the right, or that swinging right caused him to frequent up-market restaurants, but that the two trends reinforced each other. I wouldn't call them vices, but many of his old friends at International Socialism or the New Statesmen might well do so.
More importantly, the fact that he penned his recent attack on the wine waiter class suggests that at the core, he is still a nervous member of the lower orders ill at ease in the semi-feudal setting of a dining table with servants standing in attendance. Not being to the manor born, he does not know instinctively how to treat them, an he is probably slightly intimidated by their presence and by the thought that they know more about table etiquette than he does. This is actually a double burden for him as a British expatriate, because his identity requires him to act as if he knows how to use a knife and fork or which glass goes with which wine in the presence of American guests and waiting staff alike. There is always the fear that a faux pas on the part of this urbane raconteur or an altercation with a waitress will show him up as a fraud in the eyes of his entourage. Hence the angst disguised as exasperation that pervades and to a large extent defines his small-minded critique of the sommelier class. The real gentry simply don’t go in for this sort of thing. This yet another example of how standards plummet when you let the riff-raff element into the establishment.
Htich's whining has provoked oodles of comments on hundreds of websites, including a long thread at Decanter, where my personal favorite is this one by Dan Friedman of NYC.
When he was a starving leftist railing against the bourgeoisie, Hitchens couldn't or wouldn't go near a restaurant with a wine list, let alone a sommelier. Now that he's gone over to the dark side, discovering the beauty of capitalism, fine dining and free meals, Hitchens has dedicated himself to liberating the world from the oppression of poor service. A wit? An intellectual? No, a chronic hypocrite regardless of the side of the fence he's on today.
From the sommelier's standpoint, we have the testimony of Hannah Howard at Serious Eats:
I work at a wine bar. I pour a lot of wine. It goes with the job. When Christopher Hitchens posted his rant last week on Slate, I couldn't help but feel personally attacked. Hitchens abhors the intrusion of waiters who pour wine into diners' glasses. "How did such a barbaric custom get itself established," he asks, "and why on earth do we put up with it?"
I worry about being awkward, sometimes, or clumsy. But I doubt a guest at my restaurant has ever accused me, even in the deepest recesses of their secret thoughts, of barbarism. I believe it is my job to refill your glass when it is nearing empty. I know my boss certainly believes that this is my job, as do most of the people whose glasses I top off. And when I'm in the diner's seat, it's a shame to have to pour my own wine. When I go out to eat, I want to be served, not be left to serve myself.
Not only is pouring wine without being asked "a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself," Hitchens continues, but "it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle." Interrupting conversation to ask such a question directly? Hitchens is horrified. He will order his wine when he damn well pleases.
And let's not forget the throrough dressing down given Hitch by Aaron Plamondon (previously linked to by FGFM in the comments) at Natonal Post:
ny server must interact with his table. An unfortunate lack of omniscience precludes him or her from simply ordering for you, although they would certainly prefer it that way if it were possible. In order for them to bring guests exactly what they want, they must have brief conversations about food and drink. Most professionals have extensively studied both food and wine, and pride themselves on being able to lead the guest to exactly what flavours they might be looking for. It’s why they are there.
Because of this unfortunate reality, there will be interruptions — particularly if one member of the group is talking his way through “infinite” stories.
When an important story is obviously underway, a trained server will stay away — but they can stay away for only so long until they are seen by management to be neglecting their guests. Each person at the table has different needs and they likely do not revolve around the beginning and end of one person’s anecdotes.
Following Hitch's scathing review of Pat Buchanan's book Churchhill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,covered by Mark the other day on this site, Pat has come back with a spirited defence of his thesis and a brisque analysis of why Hitch felt the need to pour scorn on it in the pages of Newsweek. To hear Pat tell it, Hitch has an enormous bunch of of sour grapes to suck on as a result of Britain's rapid loss of empire and relegation from the Premier Division of global power right down to it's current minor league status. It's a cruel acusation, but worse, the lighthearted way Pat has phrased this attempted rebuttle adds up to a dismissive put down of the Contrarian's prowess. He hasn't even gone to the trouble to say "ouch" in response to most the barbs Hitch obviously tried so hard to fashion and sharpen.
"What Would Winston Do?"
So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.
Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.
That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."
Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.
Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.
We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."
Nonsense....
...The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."
This is all good-natured knockabout stuff, and with any luck it could develop into a long-running exchange of free and frank views, as long Hitch has the stomach to keep honing his invective while being continually brushed off as a minor annoyance.
This past March, Hitch dropped heavy hints in the Washington Post that the Iraq war was not all about missionary work after all, but had an economic purpose too. Replying to an argument that the overall costs don't add up, he reached for his expertise in geopolitics and cost analysis to pen a piece entitled (a la Marie Jana Korbelová aka Madeleine Albright "on the Eastern Front"), Iraq: worth the price out of the hat.
It's not enough that the Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz begin their article in Sunday's Outlook section with an old cliché (from Milton Friedman, as it happens) and then go on to make the breezy and easy assertion that "we've done the math." Their lame joint effort to affix a cost to the Iraq war is entirely based on an unspoken assumption that has nothing to do with economics or even with political economy. And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow "a war of choice" -- to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago -- and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention.
The implication of this line of thinking (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that the West can't afford to leave the darkies—any darkies, in charge of such a vitally important strategic resource as the world's largest crude oil puddle without adult, ie, Western supervision. Saddam & Sons, Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs, the Sheiks of Arabique, Pedro "Stalin" Chavez and his Castroist comrades, or the natives of upper, middle and lower Bongo-Bongo Land—you just can't trust these backward denizens of the Third World to take proper care of the mineral wealth beneath their feet. Without proper guidance and support, and a firm hand where necessary, they might very well sign the whole lot over to the Chinese and Indians in exchange for beads, mirrors, and a few container loads of rice and pot noodles, and that would be bloody intolerable, let me tell you. Bloody intolerable!
Well, fortunately for people who share such sentiments, but much to the chagrin of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Powers that Be have acted boldly to protect Our Oil. One of the sharpest analysts of the "War on Terror", Nafeez Ahmed, has done us a great service in pulling up some obscure information that might otherwise be seldom if ever articulated. He's published some interesting comments by Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE, the Foreign Office’s Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since 2003 and director of British security firm and US defence contractor, AEGIS. And according to Ellery, the Iraq ocupation is all about oil after all—plus whatever other secondary pickings the occupiers can get away with.
confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a “world shortage” of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier Ellery described as “the tide of Easternisation” – a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, to whom goes “two thirds of the Middle East’s oil.”
“The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week”, he said, “was less to do with security of supply… than World shortage.” He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. “Russia’s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies – from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,” he said. Whether Iraq began “favouring East or West” could therefore be “de-stabilizing” not only “within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest.”
Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia’s 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India....
During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, “Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi’s oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day.” He added, “With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Of course, we knew the gist of this already. But it's nice to get confirmation from the horse's mouth, so to speak. And lest you're thinking that Ellery is a loose cannon who's gone off pop after being stuck out in the Mesopotamian midday sun for too long, let me present you with some breaking news, courtesy of Press TV.
Four major oil companies are negotiating oil contracts with Iraq to return to the country once again after 36 years, Iraqi oil officials say.
According to Iraq's oil ministry officials and an American diplomat, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP - the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company - along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq's Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq's largest fields.
The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations, International Herald Tribune reported.
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.
There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration claims that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq's Oil Ministry.
For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world's dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.
So yes, Christopher, we can see how liberating Iraq is going to be well worth the price, for some people at least.
Survey time: if you could make one pundit who has a regular gig at a major newspaper or magazine stop writing forever, which one would it be?
I’ve narrowed my choice down to Easterbrook, Bill Kristol or Hitchens. However, I recognize there are several other worthy candidates (Maureen Dowd, anyone?)."
(Emphasis mine). It's nice to see others of a like mind but with the wealth of F*kwits writing for major papers out there, who would you pick?
Hitchens wasn't one of the favourites from the comments, there are too many even nuttier hate mongers with audiences but the comments weren't kind to him. This was one of my favourites.
" Hitchens is a lot like Spider Man if he used his powers for evil instead of good. Yes, the dude writes like a champion, and yes, he did some useful work back in his heyday. But his Iraq war arguments were and are made on such astonishingly bad faith that it’s poisoned everything the SOB has ever written. Ergo, good writer, shit judgment. That’s why I want him gone."
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Barrabas-like in his fervour, Caiaphas-like in his seeming indifference to the victims of the policies he supports
Christopher Hitchens bestseller on the shortcomings of the Creator of the Universe is continuing to sell well, and it gladdens the heart to see that so many in these secular times are still drawn works on religion. Reviews of the book are also continuing to appear, and although we’ve covered quite a few over the past year, there’s always room for one more, especially when it approaches Hitch and his craft from some fresh angles.
Our latest offering is by Anthony S. McCarthy and is entitled AND NEITHER IS CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, in a play on the title of the book GOD IS NOT GREAT. Intriguingly, the latest UK Atlantic edition of GING has gone all capitals and the much-parodied How Religion Poisons Everything subtitle has been dropped from the front cover in favor of THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. I preferred my “god” in lower case, but I guess the publishers know what they are doing.
McCarthy begins by noting Hitch’s belated discovery of his own Jewishness and drawing our attention to his claim to being “perhaps slightly jealous”, prior to this knowledge, at having to answer in the negative when asked if he was Jewish.
Why was Hitchens jealous? What did he think being Jewish meant? Clearly, something to do with being anti-Christian/a revolutionary – but what was the connection? Was it cultural or religious? Or, more worryingly, was Hitchens making a racial point, and agreeing with “philosopher” Alfred Rosenberg that certain genes predispose a person to revolution?
I too am curious about Hitch’s ideas about what it means to be Jewish. His claim to membership is based on the law of matrilineal descent—a late introduction dating to around the time of the Roman occupation for administrative and social purposes. In other words, Jewishness is not encoded in the genes of the X chromosome, and neither did God hand down the law of matrilineal descent to Moses, the first Jew.
These days anyone who wants to become a Jew can convert as a “sincere Jew by choice” and if they really are sincere they will be accepted, although Orthodox Judaism is less open to converts than the Conservative, Reductionist or Reform branches. But for Hitch, who was not raised as a Jew and who doesn’t adhere to the religious tenets of Judaism, the question of why he would want to be considered Jewish in the first place cries out an explanation. My own best guess is that he sees benefits in being a member of the club, for much the same reasons all sorts of people join all sorts of other clubs.
McCarthy notes that in GING Hitch describes himself as a materialist. “He buys into a particular worldview which seeks to explain away or overturn traditional religion (and to some extent traditional scholastic, largely Aristotelian, metaphysics and the moral philosophy associated with it).” However, in essence this view is “a rejection of Logos a) in the Person of Christ and b) in the form of the Natural Moral Law."
Logos in the above is another word for the Creator, and the Natural Moral Law refers to the basic moral principles and norms, such as you should not murder, rape or steal, etc., that people of good will recognize as binding on all of us regardless of whether or not they have been enshrined in social rules, laws, holy scripture, etc. So what I think McCarthy is saying is that Hitch’s materialism encompasses a rejection of a supernatural Creator either made flesh as Jesus Christ or as a source of moral imperatives.
Hitch would, I expect, claim his rejection of Logos as science-based. For McCarthy, however, science has nothing whatever to say about the issue, and he calls on the current Pope to back him up on this.
First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of the scientific. A second point… is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
The Pope, it should be noted, has a vested interest in keeping God beyond the purview of science. But this does not invalidate the point that science is neither omnipotent, omniscient nor omnicompetent, even though it may attract levels of awe, veneration and blind faith on the part of the laity that were the preserve of the Church in former days. Religious or secular, all the evidence indicates that people simply love to marvel.
But I’m dawdling. McCarthy, after questioning the scientific basis of Hitch’s rejection of Logos, then goes on to take a look at how scientific Hitch’s own work is, opting to focus on issues surrounding reproduction and its prevention in H. sapiens. He charges Hitchens with making “no important distinction between moral acts (aborting a foetus) and events of nature (miscarriage)” based on the latter’s view that there may be circumstances in which it not desirable to carry a foetus to full term. Then he wades into the question of when human life begins, taking the opportunity to fault Hitch on his basic embryology along the way.
Hitchens inveighs against the “wild statement that sperm and eggs are all potential lives that must not be prevented from fusing….” No source is given for such a statement, and it would indeed be bizarre to claim that a sperm, say, was itself a potential human being—as opposed to having the potential to help produce a human being separate from itself. Hitchens then goes on to comment “On this basis, an intrauterine device that prevents the attachment of the egg to the wall of the uterus is a murder weapon and an ectopic pregnancy (the disastrous accident that causes the egg to begin growing inside the Fallopian tube) is a human life instead of an already doomed egg…” (p. 222). Had Hitchens read even the most basic textbook of human embryology, or reflected on the second word of the phrase “ectopic pregnancy,” he might have acknowledged that what he calls an “egg” is not a gamete of the woman, but a human embryo: a human being at the earliest stage of his/her life, who is already affecting the woman in all sorts of physical ways. Had he acknowledged the scientific facts he would at least be in a position, potentially, to make a sensible moral judgement. But, as well as attempting to justify the taking of young human life (which he ‘scientifically’ decides is ‘not worth living’ in some cases) he is lamentably careless on the question of when such life actually begins. Given that Hitchens accepts that a human being is not a pure spirit, but a living human animal, it should be clear that the origin of the human being can be traced to the origin of the human animal – the fusion of the father’s and mother’s gametes (or more rarely, cloning or a similar phenomenon). And human beings, as Hitchens elsewhere seems to admit, have human interests and rights.
With the abortion issue at one end of life as with the euthanasia issue at the other, the Church’s insistence on the sacredness of human life from conception to expiration is clearly at odds with some of secular modern society’s most cherished tenets—namely the emphasis on individual choice and responsibility, and the utilitarian imperative of the greatest good for the greatest number. Finding myself in full intellectual agreement with McCarthy that human life begins at conception, I am nonetheless still in a moral quagmire of being saddened at the practice without being able to bring myself to condemn abortion or to equate it with murder, and instead I find myself in the company of Hitch and our mutual friend Bill Clinton, who said abortion should be safe, legal and rare.” I am aware that this is a treacherously slippery slope, but my own reverence for life doesn't stretch to regarding all human lives as equally sacred. I'm the sort of person who has heaps of compassion for mothers who kill their infants by drowning them in the bathtub or daughters who dispatch their terminally sick aged parents by smothering them with a pillow. But if a man were to perform the self same actions....
There is a lot more in McCarthy’s review than I could possibly cover here. He squeezes a lot of points into a minimum of space and demands rather a lot of background knowledge from the reader. But everyone dipping into his piece will be sure to find a slew of examples of why Hitch is incorrect, incompetent or fallen totally out of his tree house on any number of God-related issues.
Best of all, McCarthy shares every non-Decent’s revulsion about the Glorious War, although being McCarthy he will insist on bringing religion into the argument. So let’s leave him the epilogue.
With no hint of irony, this nihilistic revolutionary “converted” to the idea of an endless “war on terror” to wipe out fundamentalism, fascism, anti-Americanism, leftism, anti-Semitism etc. at the cost of countless innocent lives, usually those of the poor. He pursues his messianic vision, Barrabas-like in his fervour, Caiaphas-like in his seeming indifference to the victims of the policies he supports.
Hitchens the “revolutionary” is proud of his heritage. Perhaps he concurs with the British journalist Melanie Phillips, who interestingly sees the neoconservative view of the world as “a demonstrably Jewish view. Christians see man as a fallen being, inherently sinful. The neocons have the Jewish view that mankind has a capacity for both good and ill. Christians believe humanity is redeemed through Christ on the cross; the neocon approach is founded on the belief that individuals have to redeem themselves…. Neocons believe in taking the world as it is, but encouraging the good and discouraging the bad. It is this impulse to tikkun olam that gives the neocons the optimism that so distresses old-style paleo-conservatives…[T]he neocons belief that good can prevail over evil…lay behind the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Cognisant of these messianic tendencies in Hitchens, the enlightened Jew Norman Finkelstein notes that: “contemptuous of ‘transient polls of opinion,’ he’s still a Trotskyist at heart, guiding the benighted masses to the Promised Land, if through endless wars and safely from the rear.”
If only Hitchens — and all of us — were to take our bearings more from Calvary and less from self-assertive political factions, perhaps endless wars in ourselves and outside ourselves might be avoided. At any rate, if I were Hitchens I would not, as he does, take the injunction to “Know yourself” as one of the “consolations of philosophy”
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You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
Surely Mr President, you are not leaving so soon? Must you run? Very well then, since you say so...The most unfair thing said is that you came in spoiling for a fight, especially in the Middle East. I think had you really long planned such a thing, it might have been better executed. But the shock of 9/11 led to ... shall we call it improvisation? In practice, this means your name will be forever linked to Iraq where your best hope is that history will look more kindly on the attempt to salvage that ruined country.
In the meantime, the other members of the "axis of evil", North Korea and Iran, are measurably closer to nuclear status than in 2001.
China, the biggest long-term rival (and creditor) of the United States has hugely increased its reach and grasp. The Russian Federation has evolved into a near-hostile autocracy. And there is less than nothing to show for all the effort to break the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. All around the world, people are marking time, waiting you out...one point seems inescapable: Sloppy book-keeping, profligate spending and unsupervised "outsourcing" of everything played their part. And nothing contradicts the ethos of your Republican party more than that. You might be surprised how many conservatives intend to vote for Senator Obama. These range from libertarians who oppose the Patriot Act and Guantanamo, to traditionalists appalled at the rise in spending, to those opposed to the war on grounds of prudence.
Your party's new standard - bearer a man bored by economic questions and whose prestige depends on his part in America's last foreign policy calamity. Perhaps Senator John McCain will be stage one in helping make you look good by comparison..."
Thank goodness those of us who know the real Hitchens will not be fooled by this sort of crude forgery.
All readers here over 25 have a soft spot for the music,art and characteristics of their period. For me it's early ska/punk, some parks in which I discovered all sorts of illicit things and protests against the South African government and American bases.
For CH it's the politics of the late 1960s as he he told us all in a recent piece and it is the architecture and community of the village circa 1980. For him and his generation it was epoch making.
In a fairly dull but inoffensive piece in Vanity Fair "Is Gentrification Killing New york City?", Hitchens moans the moan we all feel at times. Our bars are closing, my favourite buildings have been destroyed by facadilism, everyone is getting old and leaving me behind.
After a long ramble mentioning every artist and writer of note who had spent time in the Village, (most of whom were dead years before our fatuous expat wandered across the pond), Chris leaves us with the original point that...
"Those who don’t live in such threatened districts nonetheless have a stake in this quarrel and some skin in this game, because on the day when everywhere looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only that but—more impoverishingly still—we will be unable to express or even understand or depict what we have lost."
If you haven't read it I wouldn't worry too much. The architecture may change but some other things never do. CH is still dialing them in.
One of the few redeeming CH articles in recent years is the moving piece he wrote about the effects of agent orange in Vietnam. Not afraid to pull punches in that piece he outlines the obscenity of chemical weapons on a civilian population and the unholy corruption of the US companies that provided them and have fought compensation to this day.
From Iraq we now have a better understanding of the impact of white phosphorous on the civilian population at Fallujah. This is destined to be one of the major first world war crimes of this century.
"Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say. The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah. In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tons of DU in Iraq thus far."
Just like Vietnam it is the pregnant women and the unborn that carry the burden of these atrocities.
"The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations.""I had two children who had brain damage from birth," 28-year-old Hayfa' Shukur told IPS. "My husband has been detained by the Americans since November 2004 and so I had to take the children around by myself to hospitals and private clinics. They died. I spent all our savings and borrowed a considerable amount of money."Shukur said doctors told her that it was use of the restricted weapons that caused her children's brain damage and subsequent deaths, "but none of them had the courage to give me a written report.""Many babies were born with major congenital malformations," a pediatric doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "These infants include many with heart defects, cleft lip or palate, Down's syndrome, and limb defects."
But how did Christopher see Falluja, how did he report on a modern day version of Vietnam chemical attack?
"But this "Heart of Darkness" element is part of the case for regime-change to begin with. A few more years of Saddam Hussein, or perhaps the succession of his charming sons Uday and Qusay, and whole swathes of Iraq would have looked like Fallujah. The Baathists, by playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite, were preparing the conditions for a Hobbesian state of affairs. Their looting and beggaring of the state and the society--something about which we now possess even more painfully exact information--was having the same effect.
A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what. Obviously, this prospect could never have been faced with equanimity. Iraq is a regional keystone state with vast resources and many common borders. Its implosion would have created a black hole, sucking in rival and neighboring powers, tempting them with opportunist interventions and encouraging them to find ethnic and confessional proxies. And who knows what the death-throes of the regime would have been like? We are entitled, on past experience, to guess. There could have been deliberate conflagrations started in the oilfields. There might have been suicidal lunges into adjacent countries. The place would certainly have become a playground for every kind of nihilist and fundamentalist. The intellectual and professional classes, already gravely attenuated, would have been liquidated entirely."
Let's see, to argue that Saddam would have done the same, to argue that other countries may have had designs on Iraq and to complain that even more of the educated classes would have left.
Somehow the phosphorous affected generations of Iraqi children are not worth as much as the Agent Orange affected Vietnamese. How could that be?
I'll leave it to the Iraqis whose voices seldom get heard in our discussions.
"A senior Iraqi health ministry official was quoted as saying Feb. 26 that the health sector is under "great pressure", with scores of doctors killed, an exodus of medical personnel, poor medical infrastructure, and shortage of medicines.
"We are experiencing a big shortage of everything," said the official, "We don't have enough specialist doctors and medicines, and most of the medical equipment is outdated.
He said the 2008 health budget meant that total expenditure on medicines, medical equipment and ambulances would amount to an average of 22 dollars per citizen.
But this is too late for the unknown number of babies and their families who bore the consequences of the earlier devastation. And it is too little to cover the special needs of babies who survived with deformations. "
Regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will be aware that we occasionally comment that our Christopher's comments on world affairs seem to an exercise on extended name dropping ("As Susan Sontag and I discussed Nelson Mandela a strange look came over the face of our dinner companion Norman Mailer" etc) Indeed Mr Hitchens' tendency to talk about himself is nowhere more apparent than in this recent n Memoriam to Tim Russert whose six paragraphs could be summarised as.
1) I'm really upset that he is dead
2) Here is what pops into my head about him
3) I was on his show recently
4) Did I mention he interviewed me back in the 1990's
5) There was that other time I was on his show as well!
6) I've been in Washington for ages and I can confirm that lots of other people besides me are also upset.
However there is one drawback with this history by anecdote style, what do you write about people you have never actually met?
Thankfully Mr Hitchens has the answer, as revealed here with reference to his forthcoming memoir.
"When he doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge of a writer, Hitchens employs hypothetical conversations and “encounters that never took place.”"
Personally I'm looking forward to the "hypothetical" conversation where everyone assures Christopher he was 100% right about Iraq.
When I was a young lad, I was deeply impressed by Pat Buchanan's wit and sense of humor on the campaign trail. He peeked in 1995/1996, back when he was running for president and living part-time in my home state of New Hampshire. As the years went by, the magic began to fade but it never fully disappeared. To this day, Pat remains one of the only political pundits who I actually enjoy listening to. Another one is Christopher Hitchens. In a world dominated by gray and dull political commentary, it's always refreshing to hear colorful guys like Hitch or Buchanan, regardless of whatever crazy ideas they may be peddling.
I haven't read Buchanan's new book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War (which argues that the Second World War was unnecessary) but I hear it's a real doozy and it comes as absolutely no surprise to discover Hitch's immediate rebuke of the book in Newsweek. Buchanan's book is in large part an attack on the British and on many of the ideas and myths that Hitchens holds sacred. He argues that the Holocaust was a consequence of the war, rather than a cause of it. He maintains that the British were the first to bomb civilian populations, not the Germans. And for good measure, he adds that the Germans should've been allowed to take out the Soviet Union.
Despite this, Hitchens writes with a level of respect for Buchanan that he has never shown before, treating Pat for the first time as a sort of equal. Arguing that Buchanan's 500+page book is in many respects the culmination of a life's work, Hitchens writes:
Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened. When has Buchanan ever been at his best? And this paragraph comes after one in which Hitch describes part of the book as "excellent" - these admissions are striking coming from Hitch, who never before saw it fit to describe Buchanan as anything higher than a sinister demagogue.
Buchanan is not the first to argue that WWII was unnecessary. Gore Vidal, who actually served in the war, has, after years of dropping such hints, recently written outright that he doesn't believe a single American life was worth losing in that war. Vidal's book The Golden Age gives his more extended view. Several academic historians had paved the way for Buchanan's books as well.
Nevertheless, Hitch's review concludes that Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War ultimately "stinks" because it reveals a bias and sympathy for the Germans. Perhaps. I am not immediately persuaded in either direction, but these things are always interesting to read about and I look forward to tackling Buchanan's latest some day.
I've never liked Tim Russert, but the man is now dead at 58. I for one don't buy the official story that he died of a sudden heart attack. All of the sudden! Keep in mind his crucial role in the Valerie Plame scandal. I personally think Hitch and his buddies Feith and Wolfowitz had Russert killed. But that's just my opinion...
I've just read two widely varying responses to Christopher Hitchens the person and as a polemicist.
The first is close to a hagiography from Adam Weinstein at NYR. It focuses on Hitchens as a reviewer of literature while trying to show the private cuddly side of the man.
“First,” he boomed, “I must have a piss.” He surveyed the exiting crowd at the theater’s rear. Then he joined them, sending a shout in my direction. “Come on, then. You can hold it for me.” “Okay,” I replied after a moment. “But my hands are on the cold side.” “Ah! Well then, you can help me shake it.” Moments later, Hitchens was laying out his case that war with Iraq came far too late. And he was relieving himself. I stared dolefully into the single-stall restroom’s mirror, fumbling (with both hands) for a tape recorder. Thirty-four very long seconds later, he had finished urinating. But his argument continued on."
"Anyone who spends a good deal of time with Hitchens knows that this public persona is not a put-on. He is every bit the hard-drinking, conversation-dominating contrarian people expect him to be—equally capable, according to one interviewer, “of pissing into your grandmother’s fish tank and beating you at chess: the quasi-omniscient Johnny Rotten of political journo-intellectualism.”
Weinstein mentions in passing that many of Hitchen's reviews tend to be of his friends, Rushdie, Amis etc or his heroes, Orwell and Wodehouse and finds space to admit that
"He focuses almost exclusively on male authors. The man who famously shocked Vanity Fair readers by declaring that women aren’t funny has written more than 60 literary columns in The Atlantic. Only two deal primarily with a woman writer (Jessica Mitford). "
It is a long and quite dreary piece but generally supportive of the Hitch promoted concept, that of Hitch as the lion of contrarionism bravely walking through PC barriers.
"Hitchens’ book reviews are highly readable: they shine bright and burn hot. They also often seem formulaic: the book review as biographical and political primer, with a good deal of personal confession thrown in."
Weinstein agrees (along with many of us here) that Hitchens Slate pieces are frequently awful but ends with a strange comment that seems in opposition to the rest of the piece.
"Christopher Hitchens says he’s an atheist. Yet bedding down between piles of his correspondence and reflecting on his encounters with authors, real and hypothetical, I sense he holds several dogmas that only an educated humanist can possess: a boundless faith in the omnipotence of rhetoric, the omniscience of the human intellect and the omnipresence of a right answer for most any question. In this worldview, the reader is his God. If an audience did not exist for “words that hold their value,” he might have to invent one."
A more accurate conclusion to those dogmas would be that Hitchens is his own god with supporting apostles of dead and alive white male authors.
The second piece has just been reprinted from 2005 and it is a far darker and angrier piece. While Weinstein seems to write Hitchens war talk off as part of the man's charm, Richard Seymour is determined to hold him to account for all his blood soaked rhetoric.
Seymour's piece called the Genocidal Imagination Of Christopher Hitchens leaves no doublt where the authors sympathies lie and it's not with CH. It is a fully foot noted and detailed account of CHs much support for bloody interventions and the lies he's told either to justify them or to excuse the outcomes.
he starts with Falluja and Chris's gleeful chest beating relish for the death toll.
"Lately, Iraqi NGOs and medical workers have estimated as many as 6,000 deaths, mostly civilians.9 In the face of all these facts, Christopher Hitchens remarked: "the death toll is not nearly high enough . . . too many [jihadists] have escaped."10 You may have noticed this supererogatory relish in Hitchens' rhetoric before. Here is another sample, regarding cluster bombs: If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops . . . then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, "Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through." No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.11 There is much more of this merriment. Here he is again: "Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect."12
It is mostly a step by step account of the lies Hitchens has told and the rewriting of history he has engaged in to support the deaths of his enemies. Dennis Perrin is quoted denying Hitchens claim of a road of Damascus conversion to support the war in Iraq and states that...
"It is tempting to conclude that the main function of the Kurds for Hitchens is to cover his guilt, and shame, and embarrassment about allowing himself to be made a conduit for lies in the service of mass murder -- but it is a considerable stretch to believe that Hitchens is capable of guilt, shame, or embarrassment these days. "
He covers Hitchens support for the Falkland war and many other bungled interventions and pokes fun at the idea that Hitchens contrarianism is in any way brave. As our own FGFM repeatedly claims it is soo hard to find some one who is openly anti Islamic these days.
In the most brutal put down I've ever read he concludes:
"Yet it is not just that Hitchens has slyly detached himself from those aspects of reality that he cannot bring himself to accept. It is not merely that he has moved so far to the right that he has internalized the virtues of aggressive American militarism and rapacious American capitalism. Or that he has become a calumniator, a ridiculous liar, and a back-stabber. It is not even the unpleasant confluence of the way in which his literary flair has declined in proportion to his political nous. On the strength of the evidence, his left-wing convictions weren't all that invulnerable from the start, while he has never been terribly shy of supporting gunboat diplomacy. This is not a noble mind overthrown, although there may have been some kind of regime change post-9/11. What is most alarming is that Hitchens has a new audience: he purveys his deranged fantasies about killing more and more evil-doers for the mass ranks of Republican twenty-somethings.Malodorous macho assholes who nevertheless like to think that their myopic nationalism and sociopathy has something to do with liberation and freedom -- or just, indeed, something. This is his audience today -- a collection of barely post-pubescent neophytic imperialists, and bumpkin billionaires who read the Weekly Standard. The sort of degraded, hallucinatory nonsense that this poetaster of genocide exudes these days ought not to be exposed to daylight, never mind offered up as intellectual sustenance for a class of powerful men. Hitchens can't change, of course, and he will just have to live with the thought of what a hideous figure he has become. Or, more probably, die with it, perhaps suffocating on the impacted faecal matter that is perpetually welling up inside him. Let's just say that when that tumescent cadaver finally explodes, the left should be grateful to think of what new friends he will surprise."
I apologise for the length of this post, both articles are very long and detailed. The first describes why some still like the man and second explains why we shouldn't.
About halfway through Hitch's long-winded open letter tirade, he even admits that "the Terkel stuff somehow crossed the line" just after explaining why he usually can't be bothered to respond to letters and complaints (except for all those other times). I think what 'got' to Hitchens must've been this paragraph by Terkel:
My point is a simple one: vanity. It's probably the least of our seven deadly sins; all of us have a touch of it, more or less. In some cases, more than less. Saddam Hussein is not the subject of this note; nor the nature of our approach toward the mass murderer. Chris has his opinion; The Nation's editors have theirs. It is the manner in which he has behaved toward those who differ with him: his ad hominem assaults on their intelligence and integrity. It is his vulgarity of language.
And or this line: "It grieves me that one as gifted as you has chosen to play second banana to the wanton boy [Bush] in a burlesque skit that's not very funny."
In his response, you can tell Hitch is hurt because, rather than tone down his ad hominem style in response to the allegation, he simultaneously intensifies it and dumbs it down. Terkel's letter is referred to as "foolish", "semi-coherent", "ignoble", and also - mysteriously - "long". Terkel himself is described as an "idiot", an "ass", a "fool", "deaf" and "full of himself".
Hitch's response was truly bizarre even for him. He spends several paragraphs defending himself against charges of alcoholism, even though Terkel accused him of no such thing. He whines about not receiving an advance warning of Terkel's letter by the Nation's editors, even though he had already left the magazine. Hitch repeatedly insists that it was not his idea to visit Terkel but rather Terkel's idea that they meet, even though Terkel never broached the petty subject of who invited whom.
And surprisingly, for such a self-considered master of the English langauge, Hitch also confuses the term 'rabbit-punch' to mean something of a compliment, when in fact it's just another phrase for cheap shot. Writes Christopher: "As for the idea that I have “rabbit-punched” Gore - what can I say? If I could rabbit-punch the author of Julian and Lincoln, I would need no endorsement."
There's also a curious bit where Hitch makes the same claim twice on back to back pages of having "two witnesses and a video" of something to do with him being anxious to leave Terkel's home that night and of Gore Vidal. I can't really work it out beyond that, aside from the fact that he seems to be treating the evening as if conducting a police investigation.
In his latest Slate column, Christopher asks, "Why hasn't Nelson Mandela spoken out against Robert Mugabe?"
Just before practically answering his own question, Hitchens writes, "By his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation."
Exaggerate much? I'm not going to defend what's happening in Zimbabwe, but the reported 60 dead does not equal an entire nation. As for Mandela, the man is 90 years old and for my money, senile. Someone who might not even know where he is, can hardly be blamed for perhaps not keeping up on the political developments of a neighboring country.
Indeed, Mandela's former attorney even politiely tried to inform Hitch of Mandela's condition. Hitch writes, "Bizos gave me one answer that made me wince—that Mandela is now a very old man." Hitchens simply isn't buying it: "One has a bit more respect for the old lion than to imagine that he doesn't know what's happening in next-door Zimbabwe or to believe that he doesn't understand what a huge difference the smallest word from him would make. It will be something of a tragedy if he ends his career on a note of such squalid compromise."
Squalid compromise? The man is 90 years old! Pfff. No excuse. Well, I can't wait to see how Hitchens will be doing mentally at 90...
As for Zimbabwe, my own view is that the west -particularly politicians and blowhards like Hitch - should stay out of it.
Liberation, it seems, is for life, not just for Christmas.
BAGHDAD -Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed "status of forces" agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.
"The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation," said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. "We were occupied by order of the Security Council," he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. "But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far."
Other conditions sought by the United States include control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private military contractors"
Still I'm sure no untoward pressure will be put on the "democratically" elected governent of Iraq to accept this deal..would it?
"The US is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely.
US negotiators are using the existence of $20bn in outstanding court judgments against Iraq in the US, to pressure their Iraqi counterparts into accepting the terms of the military deal, details of which were reported here yesterday.
Iraq's foreign reserves are currently protected by a presidential order giving them immunity from judicial attachment but the US side in the talks has suggested that if the UN mandate, under which the money is held, lapses and is not replaced by the new agreement, then Iraq's funds would lose this immunity. The cost to Iraq of this happening would be the immediate loss of $20bn"
I wonder what Christopher has to say about this weeks news from his pet project?
One of the most frequent criticisms thrown at Christopher Hitchens is actually one I don't agree with. CH, and other members of the "new atheists", are frequently attacked for being rude and disrespectful to religion. In this post I'd like to talk about why I think that position is wrong.
At the ever thoughtful Daylight Atheism, discussion on this topic starts with a quote by Cockburn, Americas once pre-eminent book burner and bigot.
"The respectable infidel is not even referred to, but simply those who stand in the forefront, zealous to be known as opposed to God and religion, and who by their blasphemous speeches and publications are putting to shame honest infidels. Every person must respect the infidel who says, "I cannot see nor understand these matters of religion as you do; I wish I could." There is a vast difference between such a one and the one who seeks by scoffs and sneers to wound the feelings of those who differ from him, or who makes a living by blaspheming the name of God, and discusses those subjects that most closely concern the interests of the soul so as to provoke laughter and applause from thoughtless ones. "
Daylight Atheism goes on to argue:
"Remarkably, the distinction Comstock draws in the above excerpt is one that's still heard today. Even today, the myth persists that there are two different kinds of atheists: the ones who are decent and honest and respect other people's faith, and the ones who are nasty and extremist and take pleasure in scoffing and mocking at other people's deeply held and sincere religious convictions. This is an entirely spurious distinction. There is no bright line that can be drawn between "respectful" and "insulting" speech; pretty much anything that anyone can say will be thought of as entirely proper and appropriate by some and as outrageous by others. "
"Even if we were out to hurt believers' feelings, what would that prove? After all, we don't belong to any of those religions! We're under no obligation to treat those religions with respect or to avoid giving offense. That's a rule for believers, not for nonbelievers, and we are not bound by it. Nor should we be concerned whether we seem "respectable" in the eyes of believers. Civil, yes. Reasonable, yes. But "respectable" should set off alarm bells: historically, that word has always been used by advocates of majoritarianism to try to shut down reform movements by demonizing them as a bunch of wild, unkempt radicals. After all, when prejudice and superstition are popular, being "respectable" means endorsing those sentiments and going out of one's way not to offend the people who hold them. "Respectable", in this context, means keeping quiet and not making a fuss. To this, I answer that the prejudiced and the irrational should be offended. Discomfiting the holders of such beliefs is the only way society has ever made moral or intellectual progress, and we can never make any if we tiptoe around them. "
"There are a great many people on this planet who profess a belief in one deity or another who are fine people- good to their families, generous to the poor, and generally good citizens in every sense of the word. In spite of their mania, these people are generally not bad sorts to have around, invite over for a barbecue, lift a few glasses with, or date. Sadly, a small but vocal minority of these people are wingnuts and whackjobs of the first water. When it comes to closed minds and undeserved senses of superiority, these people have it in spades. Since actual evidence for the existence of their Angry Invisible Skyman is not available, they refuse to believe that evidence to the contrary has any meaning. The scientific method demands proof and reproducible results before stating facts. These people of faith cannot produce proof, evidence, or reproducible results for any of their beliefs, so the scientific method must go. This sort of blinkered, philistine pig-ignorance leads to atrocities in the name of Angry Invisible Skyman."
"This sort of thing is stupid. I have a low tolerance for stupidity, but when someone wants to force me to practice their stupidity, I start looking around for a weapon. When someone screams that I must say, “Peace be upon him” after naming Mohammed, I promptly invite them to eat a bowl of dicks. If they persist, I like to throw pork at them and show them the bottoms of my shoes. When people shriek that I cannot speak the name of a certain zombie jew, I take a great deal of pleasure informing them that the man’s name was not Jesus, it was most likely Yehoshua or Joshua ben Yosef."
"Pointing out the ignorance and stupidity of the willfully ignorant and stupid is not impolite or cruel, it is a necessity. It is also a survival mechanism for our civilization. Allowing outspoken stupidity to go unchallenged is to be complicit in its ascendancy. I, for one, will not be a party to the destruction of our civilization and society at the hands of the religious barbarians in our midst."
I could go on but wont. In short I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I don't believe that religious thought should be privileged thought. If I want to believe in the Flying Spaghetti monster I have no right to expect that you wont point and laugh. Particularly if I want it taught in schools next to science.
Christopher Hitchens makes claims about religion that are not accurate and on that he should be called, he also appears to privilege some religions over other which is also pretty foolish. But not being polite about religion is not one of Chris's many sins.
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This new book about Hitchens really really likes Hitchens
I've only just started reading the new book on Hitchens by Cottee and Cushman (which is also written partially by Hitchens - he does the afterword) called Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, but I'm already annoyed by it. The book opens with this half-baked Acknowledgments page assurance from the authors:
Beyond his generous permission to reprint the articles which the editors selected and writing the afterword, Christopher Hitchens played no part in the conceptualization or production of this volume. His distance from the project was a necessary condition for the success of this book.
Can we begin by wondering how it is that someone who writes the afterword of a book has played "no part" in that book's production? I guess it depends on how you define 'production'. We can take it for granted that Hitch wasn't down at the printing machines haggling over the cost per unit. Nor was involved in working the layout with the design team.
But it's the last assertion (which is also the final sentence on the Acknowledgments page) that I find most intriguing: "His distance from the project was a necessary condition for the success of this book." Um, why?? The book is mostly a collection of essays already published by Hitchens and by some of Hitch's critics. The authors Cottee and Cushman seem to think by asserting Hitch's supposed "distance" from the project, that it somehow makes the work more legitimate.
But on the very next page, they begin their Introduction with a fawning description of Hitchens. There's absolutely no attempt to conceal their love for the man or to try to be 'objective' about him in any way. That's what's puzzling. Check out this remarkable and cringe-inducing passage that appears on the second page of the Intro:
Hitchens is never happier than when arguing, and arguing is what he is best at. In argument, Hitchens cuts a formidable and intimidating figure. He never lets a cliche or euphemism pass uncontested, and he never gives so much as a millimeter, nor does he back down - ever. Above all, he is daring and morally courageous: Hitchens will take on anybody or any subject. For the sake of argument or point of principle, he will antagonize and infuriate and, if need be, unmake friends and allies. The great merit of Hitchens's work is its honesty. Hitchens can be relied on to say exactly what he thinks, whomever it offends. (Emphasis all mine.)
Talk about piling up a bunch of cliches! I guess Hitchens 'never lets a euphemism or cliche pass uncontested' because he once wrote exactly "never let a euphemism or cliche pass uncontested". And what's with all of these absolute statements? The paragraph reads like high school essay writing or the meanderings of some power of positive thinking type: 'He will NEVER let you down. He will ALWAYS be there for you." And their laughable claim about Hitch's supposed "honesty," well, that's the clincher for me: Cottee and Cushman are totally blinded by their affection for Hitch.
With their love for Hitch stated from the outset, how the hell is it that his "distance" from the project should be a "necessary condition" for the book's success? Necessary for the publisher perhaps? In order to market this book as the objective Hitchens Guide and not the mere hagiographic treatment that it is? Or what?
I do thank the authors for favorably citing an essay I wrote on 'offensive art', from which they borrowed a line I wrote describing effective polemical writing in general, in order to describe Hitch's style of writing in particular.
At last! Hot off the press is this rare clip from last summer of Chris Hitchens at "Bookmark at the Beach 2007."
Doesn't he look simply dashing in those cool shades and that low-buttoned shirt? Very manly. The shirt was not quite unbuttoned enough though--but don't worry, Hitchens fixes that later, and appears to start leaking or something around 2:40.
One has to hand it to Hitch for how much sloppy gibberish he can cram into a few meandering sentences--even when you are trying to agree with him. Not to nitpick, but it's quite a feat how many half-truths and untruths we get a taste of here, given how short the clip is:
The human species is 100000 years old. Now you are asked to believe, by members of Ross's church, that that went on, heaven watched that for 98000 years and 2000 years ago said: it's time to intervene.
Um, no you're not. Unless Ross happens to be a member of some unusual Christian sect that doesn't use the Old Testament. Or one that hasn't heard of Genesis. God allegedly intervenes since the beginning of humanity.
And the best way to do that would be in a Bronze Age part of the Middle East by means of a human sacrifice that would redeem us all. Now I could be persuaded of a virgin birth before I could be persuaded of that.
Er, the Bronze Age had been over for more than a thousand years before Jesus. And so what if it was the Bronze Age? I'm sure Hitchens dismisses all of the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece because they were ancient.
That cannot be believed.
Wanna bet?
Simply is not true. Nor those from whom it was plagiarized, the Jews, who thought it was 4000 years and God spoke only to Jews.
Oh, Judaism began in 2000 BC?
And I don't think God spoke to an epileptic, illiterate Arab merchant either, 500 years after that, with the unalterable final word of God that cannot be challenged, in the form of the restoration called the Koran.
In 1500 BC?
It is not possible to believe.
I've got some bad news for you Chris.
We have to understand that our morality, our history, our philosophy, doesn't come from this nonsense of revelation, and those who say that it did are our enemies and will always preach intolerance, hatred, ignorance and stupidity.
Foolish me, I wasn't aware that our CW was writing for World Affairs Journal and apologise if any fellow HWites have already commented on this piece. Anyway, given it's a Friday before a long weekend here and I was feeling very lazy I was prowling CWs recent oeuvre and discovered a pile of merde on this site.
Our dear Chris has lent his overwhelming intellect to the problem with Iran and come up with these gems.
"Iran can boast quite an impressive “civil society” movement, which would like both to replace the current ramshackle theocracy and to adopt better and closer relations with the United States. Yet currently, and rather depressingly, the spokesmen of this movement prefer to avoid identifying too closely with Washington."
Contradicted in the next paragraph by this
"Consider our advantages. To begin with, all visitors to Tehran report an extraordinary level of sympathy with the United States among the general population."
So do the young and "with it" people like the US or not?
Well they have to suffer the shame " Iranians are acutely aware of the backwardness of their country and society " as they should because they have a "backward rug-and-pistachio economy that it was operating when the mullahs seized power almost thirty years ago. I mention the Turkish comparison for another reason: many Iranians are actually Azeri or Turkic and feel, as well as a resentment against Persian chauvinism, a kinship to a society more advanced and more secular than their own."
But it is alright because Hitchens has a solution in line with the most blood and thunder evangelical rapture whore
"Finally, changing my gear and tone a little, I want to mention another kind of advantage altogether. Iran is scheduled to suffer from a devastating earthquake in the very near future"
So CWs whole strategy for Iran is that he's hoping for a horrendous earthquake so that the stupid Iranians will be thankful for US aid as they drag their battered bodies out of collapsed buildings. What a humanitarian, Angela Jolie eat your heart out!
Today I have come to believe that Christopher Hitchens no longer even reads the stuff he's putting out. In a incredible piece for the bin liner that is the Mirror. Hitchens writes about Obamas gaining the democratic nomination. In a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy he bemoans the fact that much of the media is concentrating on Hillary instead of Obama, and then proceeds to spend the majority of the article talking about , you guessed it, Hillary.
"And yet, all or most of the talk was not about him, in his moment of triumph, but about the woman he had eclipsed in delegate and super-delegate votes. Would she still be able to claim a majority of the popular vote? Would she concede gracefully? (An early report on Monday from the Associated Press, appearing to suggest such a thing, was denied as fast as any story has ever been denied.) Would she take the fight all the way to the convention in Denver? Most of all, and presumably most irksome and distracting to the victor, would she deign to accept the second or Vice-Presidential spot on the ticket, always assuming that it was to be offered her? ...
every time the silver bullet and the stake through the heart were subsequently deployed, they continued to fail. And now, it is more or less clear (isn't it?) that Mrs Clinton will not or cannot be the Democratic nominee. So, why does it seem that today was the first day of her campaign in 2012, rather than the last day of her effort in 2008 or - even more poignant - the first day of Senator Obama's unobstructed run?"
Mind you, he does make a side trip into greater evil, when he repeats the current right wing rumour that there's a tape that purportedly shows Michelle speaking racism or black treason or some such garbage. (A tape that has yet to be shown to exist.)
"Thus, there are a number of spectres at his victory feast. A persistent rumour, which may be an urban legend, says that there is worse to come from the past of his old Chicago congregation, and that this time the nasty rhetoric comes from his wife. The willingness of so many people to believe such a story may or may not be significant in itself: it certainly mars the idea of a stainless candidate who is "post-racial".
So there we have it, an article about Hillary bemoaning articles about Hillary, and a rumour about Michelle which proves how nasty people who make rumours will be to Obama.
(this is the first post by our new contributor A. Rakhmetov)
Those of you hanging on every word of the Far Right's aging enfant terrible Dinesh D'Souza should take note of this recent think piece of his , where he is kind enough to take a moment away from single-handily defeating the dark hordes of angry atheists at the gates of Christendom to make a rather startling claim.
Well that's a bit harsh of you dear reader, although I concede you've certainly got a point. Dinesh D'Souza is indeed a distinguished card-carrying member of the self-satirizing Far-Right, and obviously so silly that nobody serious takes him seriously. However, it appears that our boy Hitch not only takes him very seriously--but is so credulous that D'Souza actually shapes Chris's innermost beliefs and deepest convictions! It turns out that Hitchens is even more gullible than we dared to dream. In D'Souza's post, which might as well be called "What's So Great about Dinesh D'Souza," he reveals the following:
"Recently Hitchens told me and my wife that I am responsible for one of the big conversions in his life. He informed me about something about which I had no idea: following our debate on capitalism vs. socialism at Georgetown University more than a decade and a half ago, Hitchens said he abandoned socialism. "After that evening," Hitchens said, "I just stopped calling myself a socialist." I was too polite to speculate on what might follow for Hitchens from our God v. atheism debates, but of course I was delighted to hear that I helped a friend find his way out of the dead-end maze of socialism."
So there you have it folks. Hitchens abandons Socialism after being KO'ed in one wallop from a two-bit court jester like D'Souza. Orwell would be so proud. Let's hope that D'Souza is just lying about all of this.
For those of you who slow down on the highway to watch traffic accidents, ere is the socialism debate h. If you were less than impressed by Hitchens' recent debate against D'Souza on religion, you won't be disappointed by how disappointing Hitchens' performance is here.
To spare you from having to listen to D'Souza, here's his entire case more or less summed up in one sentence: The Soviet Union was bad and it collapsed! And there's also something in there about how he doesn't know the difference between a horse and a bull. In brief, pretty cogent stuff. No wonder he took-in Hitchens that easily. And the best Hitchens could muster to respond with was: "Oh yeah? Well at least Marxism was a vocabulary-builder." I kid you not.
I'm still in a state of shock that a little douche like D'Souza has so much influence over Hitchens. Given their recent debate over religion, I presume that any day now Hitchens is going to trade in his neoconservatism for whatever monotheism happens to be chic at that moment. All that's left now is to bet on which religion it will be. Maybe the good ol' C. of E.? Nah, not reactionary enough. Methodism? Been there done that. Catholicism? Hmm, heck we all know our Hitch's style is to go big or go home, I think I might have to put my money on this horse (if it's not actually a bull).
But of course, only time will truly tell. In the meantime, you can place your bets at HW today!*
*Disclaimer: All bets may be kept regardless of outcome.
As the Duke of Gloucester is reported to have said to Edward Gibbon. But the paraphrase is apt because Hitch has a brand new magnum opus of almost all of his own stuff out in the collected essays market, and it also charts a decline and fall or sorts. Not so much of a modern empire, although the US flexing its muscles in parts east does bear comparison with a drowning man flailing his arms and legs frantically in a futile attempt to stay afloat. No, what this book maps out is the decline and fall of Hitch's journalism over the course of the opening years of the present century.
Entitled Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left, it's a compilation of articles by the man himself plus a few by his critics—although not surprisingly we Hitch Watchers have been snubbed by the editors. They didn't write! They didn't phone!
The earliest of these pieces were written and publshed within a few days of the perpetrators of 9/11 carrying out their evil plan, while the most recent date back to the autumn of 2005 in the wake of the London 7/7 terror attacks. And concentrated together in a handy paperback edition, they strike this reviewer as making a strong case for Hich as a victim of progressive cognitive impairment, cognitive impairment, cognitive imp——Sorry!.
Back when it was announced that Ronald Reagan had developed Alzheimer's Disease, Hitch quipped in the Nation: "How could they tell?" The joke rested on the understanding that Reagan had never been one of the brighter sparks in the firmament at the best of times. Contrariwise, when Iris Murdoch began to develop Alzheimer's, most people around her couldn't tell what was going on precisely because she was such a sparkling intellectual that even with a modest dimming, her light continued to dazzle. Hitch at his peak though, was neither as bright as Murdoch nor as dim as Reagan. His candle burned brighter than most people's but he was never blindingly brilliant, and his waning luminosity is has long been obvious to all but his most devoted admirers. But I digress.
This book is divided into sections. Part I: HITCHENS ON TERROR, takes us from American Society Can Outlast or Absorb Practically Anything (September 16, 2001) to Why Ask Why (October 3, 2005), passing through such gems as The Pursuit of Happiness is at an End, Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists, It's a Good Time for War, Bush's Secularist Triumph, and Yes, London Can Take it. Taken together with Part II: HITCHENS IN IRAQ and Part III: HITCHENS ON THE LEFT, the book includes 41 of Hitch's essays and articles from Slate and elsewhere, many of which will be familiar.
Tucked on at the end, as if in acknowledgement that Hitch's journalistic output over the period in question doesn't stand up very well, the editors have included PART IV: CRITICAL RESPONSES AND EXCHANGES, which includes part (not all) of the exchange with Chomsky and some less than hagiographic writing on Hitch from the likes of Norman Finkelstein, Dennis Perrin, Juan Cole, and Richard (Lenin) Seymour). Putting this book together can hardly have been such a Herculean task that the editors, Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, deserved to have their names on the cover. Virtually all the material is online and cut-and-pasteable, so in essence their work consisted of penning a short intro, deciding which Hitch articles to include and which section to place them in. Tolstoy's wife had a much tougher time copying out War and Peace by candlelight, and she received no credit whatsoever for her labours.
Keith Olbermann is really enjoying himself this week analyzing Scott Mclellen's recent revelations and the "talking point" responses they seem to have generated. As you watch this clip, please ponder whether Hitch "is in the loop" and misinforming the public, or "out of the loop" and being misinformed just like the rest of us.
And as a bonus here's Keith interviewing Joe Wilson last November on how treason is never old news.
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Hitch endorses “the stupidest fu**ing guy on the planet”
Christopher Hitchens must have swallowed hard when Scott McClellan told the world that he had been told to lie during the Valerie Plame outing. Having been a defender of the Bush administration, and Scooter Libby in particular, we awaited Hitchens' mea culpa with… nah!... We knew he'd pull another piece of shit from his ass.
He hasn't disappointed us as he has decided to completely ignore any mention of the Plame affair and refers to the discarded Bush butt-boy as a "mooncalf" before touting an apologia for the war in Iraq written by a man General Tommy Franks told his own men was "The dumbest fucking guy on the planet" (Doug Feith). While Hitchens accuses McClellan of failing to provide "evidence against interest", presumably for all the cash McClellan can expect from his book sales, Hitchens is presumably of the opinion that Douglas Feith wrote his book, War and Decision, from some kind of objective standpoint as Feith apparently "is capable of separating his views from his narrative" and has no interest whatsoever in providing an apologia for the disastrous Iraq war and the "War on Terrorism" of which it is apparently a part.
Hitchens then desperately sets up a series of strawmen using Feith's book to show, of all things, that there had, in fact, been post-invasion planning despite what the nay-sayers may claim; that the administration had, in fact, discussed the Geneva Conventions. He fails to see that the rhetorical and hyperbolic question "Had the administration done any planning whatsoever for post-invasion Iraq?" is not to be taken literally in a God-created-the-Heavens-and-the-Earth-in-Six-Days sense but born from incredulity engendered by the utter pig's ear that the "stupidest fucking guy on the planet" and his friends were responsible for. As for the Geneva Conventions, it is faint praise indeed to say that the administration had heard of them!
Not content with strawmanning us to death, Hitchens also serves up a variety of "So-What?"s such as how "dry" Feith's prose style is and this jaw-dropper: "the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld." Presumably his slavering wasn't as obvious as it was for the others in the room that day and with his famous photographs of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein perhaps some of his concern was understandable and wasn't exactly "evidence against interest" which Hitchens insisted was a tenet of Bertrand Russell.
Feith's book hasn't been reviewed by any of the "liberal media" which gave so much coverage to McClellan and it has Hitchens fuming. However, I doubt Hitchens will have convinced many people to go out and buy it but, for those who are interested, it comes highly recommended by Henry Kissinger.
Christopher Hitchens an apology Many people, no doubt for their own selfish reasons, may have interpreted recent Christopher Hitchens articles as suggesting that race had nothing to do with Barack Obama's bid for the white house.
"The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who believes that there are human races."
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my "race," unless I was permitted to put "human." The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put "white," which is not even a color let alone a "race," and I sternly declined to put "Caucasian," which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you "black."
May have led the naive reader to assume that Mr Hitchens would never write an article on the US presidential election based purely on racial grounds.
We are of course happy to apologise on behalf of Mr Hitchens and we look forward to more of the same lowest common denominator stuff in the UK press, where he thinks no-one will notice.
While I don't have a lot of time for foodies, particularly those who have a vested interest in selling me overpriced wine, Dr. Aaron Plamondon (Sommelier and Military Historian) does a good job of telling Hitch to put a cork in it!
When an important story is obviously underway, a trained server will stay away -- but they can stay away for only so long until they are seen by management to be neglecting their guests. Each person at the table has different needs and they likely do not revolve around the beginning and end of one person's anecdotes. Moreover, unless the server bumps the storytelling guest as he pours, it should not be a major distraction. Professional servers pride themselves on their grace. For someone with such a powerful mind as Mr. Hitchens, I find it hard to believe that someone quietly appearing at the table and gently pouring wine would distract from his story. Perhaps the story wasn't that good to begin with.
The waiter's monologues the writer disdains are also supposed to provide a description of anything fresh that came into the kitchen that day, is in limited quantities and will likely disappear quickly to other tables. This is information that most guests not only like to hear about -- they demand it. (At low-to medium-quality restaurants, admittedly, the specials are designed to get rid of the fish that is about to turn. But I don't think this is where Mr. Hitchens dines.) It is almost as if, in all his vast experience, Mr. Hitchens has never had good service and cannot comprehend why waiters have to be there and annoy his table. I assume when he goes to a salon, he also cuts his own hair to avoid interaction with the stylist.
The author's contention that servers top up his wine glass to bully him into quickly ordering another bottle is also misguided. He writes: "Many females, for example, confine themselves to one glass per meal or even half a glass." Firstly, I can assure him that those who drink less than he come in both sexes. And in over a decade of service, I have rarely found that guests have trouble simply saying "no thank you" as the server pauses with the wine bottle over their glass before pouring. If they refuse to interact with the server and wine is poured and then wasted as it stays in the glass, perhaps Mr. Hitchens should be mad at his company for not refusing something offered.
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And then there is the issue of padding the bill. A server at a reputable establishment is not trying to force you to buy more -- he is simply reacting to your empty glass. You either want more or you don't -- it's only polite to ask. The only person who is responsible for the wine being consumed is you.
As for Mr. Hitchens' desire to pour the wine for "his guests," well, then he should invite them to his home. Everyone at the table in a fine dining restaurant is a guest of the restaurant and their only responsibility is to sit back and enjoy. Thankfully, that is all most people want to do. If customers are going to pay 15-20% of the bill to the server, the staff better be attentive, responsive and knowledgeable. Perhaps his rant was to avoid having to tip.
Many people do not understand restaurant etiquette and know nothing about food or wine. They order the beef tenderloin well done and then blame the kitchen because it took too long and tastes terrible. The customer is not always right. The famous Chicago chef Charlie Trotter once wrote that you should not be afraid to fire your customers. I do not think Mr. Hitchens falls into this category. But with all his education and experience in dining out, he should simply enjoy what great service truly can be, and go where it can be found. If he wants to do away with one of the oldest professions, I would suggest drive-thru.
Peters Drive-In in Calgary is excellent. They give you an extra half-patty per burger -- you don't even have to ask.
Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson, has now done for Dubya what Hitch did for Kissinger. He's written a book that sets out the case for putting Bush on trial for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting in Iraq. Only Bugliosi, as a legal professional, has gone into much greater detail than Hitch did.
My own instincts are that Bush has earned his day in court as he has earned nothing else in life, and that even though he is a puppet fronting for others who deserve to be in the dock with him, he has been a willing and enthusiastic participant in their crimes. Moreover, as bleak as the prospects for a trial may seem at present, the way may yet lay open to one in the fullness of time. Until that day comes, we can at least dream of justice.
If Bush ever goes on trial, perhaps Hitch will offer himself up as a character witness. And there is the rather remote but nonetheless intriguing possibility that our lad may be asked to give an account of his and Wolfowitz's role in encouraging the President to invade Iraq, or even face the charge of accessory before the fact on upwards of 4,000 counts of murder and rising.
If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren't speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem ludicrous.** But we are dealing with the president of the United States here.
On the other hand, the intensity of rage against Bush in America has been such (it never came remotely this close with Clinton because, at bottom, there was nothing of any real substance to have any serious rage against him for) that if I heard it once I heard it ten times that "someone should put a bullet in his head." That, fortunately, is just loose talk, and even more fortunately not the way we do things in America. In any event, if an American jury were to find Bush guilty of first degree murder, it would be up to them to decide what the appropriate punishment should be, one of their options being the imposition of the death penalty.
Although I have never heard before what I am suggesting -- that Bush be prosecuted for murder in an American courtroom -- many have argued that "Bush should be prosecuted for war crimes" (mostly for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. But for all intents and purposes this cannot be done.
*Even assuming, at this point, that Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in the Iraq war, under federal law he could only be prosecuted for the deaths of the 4,000 American soldiers killed in the war. No American court would have jurisdiction to prosecute him for the one hundred and some thousand Iraqi deaths since these victims not only were not Americans, but they were killed in a foreign nation, Iraq. Despite their nationality, if they had been killed here in the States, there would of course be jurisdiction.
Thanks to Angrysoba for this link to Hitch doing his sad bastard act at the Hay Festival. This is a man who has scant respect for primitive people, chimpanzees, sheep, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
Highlights from Hitch:
If we don't stop them they'll destroy everything.
For me, Valentine's Day 1989 was my 9/11.
Between the literal and the ironic mind.
That ignorant, fearful superstitious side! And it shows.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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